Madden in tangle over lobbyists

Victorian Planning Minister
Justin Madden
has declared he always brings departmental officials to meetings with developers and lobbyists – except when he attends Labor Party fundraisers or is approached in public.

At a Parliamentary Accounts and Estimates Committee hearing yesterday, Mr Madden struggled to maintain a consistent line when explaining how he dealt with proponents and their lobbyists.

Initially, Mr Madden said he “hand on heart" believed that whenever he met with project proponents or their lobbyists he did so with someone from the Department of Planning and Community Development.

Mr Madden said yesterday department officers who accompanied him at meetings would take notes and those notes would then be “fed into the system".

“I have meetings with all sorts of people interested in the planning system," he said.

But Opposition MPs challenged him to reveal whether he brought departmental officials to Progressive Business fund-raising events where developers or lobbyists could be paying for access to ministers.

Mr Madden declined to directly answer that question and conceded that attendees at fundraisers might have tried to speak to him but said that such behaviour would have no influence on the assessment of a project.

“I don’t believe people have approached me, people will believe from time to time that people made an approach to me but their definition of an approach might be something different to mine," he said.

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Mr Madden insisted he rarely attended such fundraisers although a flier for an forthcoming Progressive Business dinner in June lists him as a “special guest/table host’’.

Opposition planning spokesman Matthew Guy accused Mr Madden of being misleading when he claimed to attend meetings only with departemental staff in attendance.

“The fact that he then refused to name a single departmental staff member who’d accompanied him to Labor functions sponsored by developers, and refused to re-state the claim, shows his sneakiness and incompetence know no bounds," he said.

Mr Guy said if he was planning minister he would ensure that a departmental official attended all “formal meetings.

But Mr Guy said he could not guarantee that developers would not attempt to discuss their projects at other functions and Mr Madden should not have made such a claim.

Meanwhile, Mr Madden also said his controversial facilitation unit had fast-tracked 36 “priority projects" worth $5.6 billion since its establishment last year.